Spark: Predicting bushfire spread

Bushfires are complex processes, making it difficult to accurately predict their progress across the landscape, so we have developed Spark, which can model bushfire spread to help plan for and manage bushfires.

The challenge

Predicting bushfire spread

Although a natural occurrence in Australia, bushfires have the ability to be devastating, particularly when they come into contact with homes, infrastructure and people. Improved knowledge of how bushfires spread is critical for emergency management operations, risk prediction and timely issuing of warnings.

This knowledge can also be used to predict the spread of bushfires using computer models. Such predictions can allow better preparation for emergency situations, save lives and make communities safer, stronger and more resilient. However, there are many elements that influence fire behaviour making it difficult to accurately predict fire spread.

Our response

A flexible bushfire simulation framework

We developed 'Spark', an open framework for fire prediction and analysis. It takes our current knowledge of fire behaviour and combines it with state-of-the-art simulation science to produce predictions, statistics and visualisations of bushfire spread.

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Dr Mahesh Prakash: Spark is a bushfire spread modelling capability which has been developed by CSIRO.

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It provides emergency management agencies a much better ability to predict fires, and save lives and property.

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Spark is able to provide information around the rate at which the fires spreads, the direction in which it spreads, as well as the locations that the fire actually affects. Your inputs are essentially your weather data, mainly your wind data, the location where the fire has been started, the data about vegetation, the fuel type, as well as the terrain.

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And once you have all these inputs you can run your fire predictions for any given location.

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And it runs better than real time, so you can actually make your decisions around where to actually target the fire fighting efforts.

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It can also be used by researchers to actually try and understand different types of fire models.

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Now that Spark’s actually publically available and it’s downloadable from our website, emergency agencies can actually have a firsthand look at how it performs, and Spark’s actually able to be integrated with their existing systems.

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You also have the ability to incorporate future changes, which might also include climate change effects, into any model that gets developed.

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People can be better prepared against potential bushfire risks, both from a saving lives perspective, as well as saving property perspective.

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Weather conditions such as wind, temperature and humidity contribute significantly to fire behaviour. Spark can read weather data from meteorological forecasts and use this information directly within fire models. Geographic information, such as land slope, vegetation and un-burnable areas, such as roads and water bodies, also affect the spread of the fire. Spark allows users to easily incorporate such environmental data and to use this information to define a fire spread rate.

The results

More information for better descision making

Spark takes current knowledge of fire behaviour and combines it with state-of-the-art simulation science to predict bushfire spread.

Spark takes current knowledge of fire behaviour and combines it with state-of-the-art simulation science to predict bushfire spread.

Predicting the spread of bushfires will have benefits across planning and also emergency management, including: